apps

With E3 week still rolling out the big gaming announcements, Japanese developer Square Enix gave its presentation earlier today, revealing that the iconic RPG Final Fantasy VII will be coming to iOS before the end of this summer. You may have heard to big news earlier in the week about the long-awaited FF7 remake in HD coming to the PlayStation 4, but that's not the version of the game we're talking about. iOS will be getting a port of the original PlayStation version that was released in 1997.

While all of the existing applications in Adobe's Creative Cloud suite received new features and overall enhancements this week, the 2015 update does introduce one brand new app. Stock is Adobe's new attempt at a marketplace for stock photos, built right into apps that already make up Creative Cloud. Since a majority of professional photographers who sell photos through stock imagery services use Photoshop and other Adobe apps, the company though to become its own image dealer, with a goal of simplifying the buying process.

Adobe has announced this year's updates to Creative Cloud suite of applications, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, InDesign, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and more. While the 2014 versions were all about making the cloud the central component to all the software, the 2015 Creative Cloud update brings about refinements and performance enhancements. One example includes Linked Assets, which allows content within Creative Cloud Libraries to be automatically updated when one member of a team makes changes, even from within multiple applications.

Adobe has turned its eyes upon Android, and bestowed users on the platform with a handful of new mobile apps, rounding out its mobile offerings that have been available to iOS users. All four apps are available now to Android users via the Google Play Store, and they’re comprised of Color CC, Photoshop Mix, Shape CC, and Brush CC. The move comes sooner than expected, but not soon enough depending on who you ask. Demand for more Adobe products on Android has been consistently high.

Microsoft-owned Skype has announced today that it will be merging its two Windows apps into a single offering by retiring the touch-based, Modern UI version, and instead moving forward with the traditional desktop app. The touch-friendly Skype app was made for Windows 8 devices, while Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs have always continued to use the desktop app. In anticipation of the debut of Windows 10, the modern Skype app will no longer work beginning July 7th, and users will need to switch to the desktop version.

Praise the heavens, mobile video shooters, Twitter has finally gotten with the times and lets you record videos in landscape orientation from within their iOS and Android apps. When Twitter first made in-app video recording available earlier this year, it used square formatting, made popular by social apps Vine and Instagram. Twitter makes it easy to shoot video in the new orientation, just hold your phone like normal, rotate it 90 degrees to the right or left, and start recording!

It's been revealed that with iOS 9, Apple has given developers the choice of limiting their app to run on iPhones and iPads with 64-bit CPUs. While iOS 9 itself is capable of running on a large number of Apple's older devices, developers now have the ability of specifying that previous generations of hardware cannot run their apps. The reason is not to be mean or make owners of said devices angry, but rather to ensure devices will be compatible with the app being offered, and that they don't run the software poorly.

As developers at Apple's WWDC even this week have had a few days now to play around with the new iOS 9 beta, Settings options and documentation have been discovered that suggest Apple will allow developers to build app focused on ad blocking and privacy. These features aren't being widely promoted, but were found deep in the iOS Developer Library. Called "Content Blocking," the feature relies on an API that will remove elements like images and cookies from web views.

PlayStation Vue, Sony's new television streaming service, has released its first iOS app for the iPad. PlayStation Vue Mobile offers similar functionality to what you'd have when using a PS3 or PS4 console, the only catch is that it's currently limited to the cities of Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. These are the same locations that the Vue service launched in back in March. It's likely Sony will bring this up during E3 next week, hopefully with dates for additional availability.

Not one to be left behind on the recent Apple Watch app craze, internet commerce giant eBay has just announced its own app for Apple's new wearable. eBay's new smartwatch app won't allow for users to search for and place bids on items, thankfully, but it does aim to provide both buyers and sellers with useful updates and alerts on marketplace items. This follows similar smartwatch apps from the company for devices like Pebble and Samsung Galaxy Gear.